Making Connections

American Literature 1820–1865

1. In part, women were denied formal education due to perceptions of the moral hazards of reading Greco-Roman classics and novels. See, for example, Fanny Fern’s “Male Criticism of Ladies’ Books.” Even at the advent of the twentieth century, women were ‘protected’ by men from potential moral degeneration, often at the expense of basic freedoms—and even sanity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman addresses this subject in her story “The Yellow Wall-paper” and her essay “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall-paper” (pages 844–45 in volume C).
2. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is a powerful account of the humiliations of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit. Like Douglass, Booker T. Washington emerged as a national figure as the result of a short public address of his personal experiences in Up From Slavery (pages 746–80 in volume C).
3. The condition of Jewish Americans and their relationship to their faith at the time Emma Lazarus wrote “In the Jewish Cemetery at Newport” comes in sharp contrast with the portrayal of conflicted religious loyalties and personal feelings in Philip Roth’s story “Defender of the Faith” (pages 2278–99 in volume E).
4. Bayard Taylor’s letters home from California, collected in Eldorado, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, about his travels in Connecticut, show evidence of a vastly changed North American continent since the arrival of the earliest European colonists. For some of the oldest extant travel accounts, see Bartolomé de las Casas’s The Very Brief Revelation of the Devastation of the Indies and Samuel de Champlain’s The Voyages of the Sieur de Champlain (pages 39–42 and 88–97, respectively, in volume A).